The Sicilian's Baby Bargain

In the end Annie had begun to feel so desperate and so pressured, afraid that somehow Colin might succeed in forcing her and her baby apart, that a few weeks after Ollie’s birth, whilst Colin had been away in Scotland, sorting out the affairs of an elderly cousin of his father’s who had recently died, she had decided not to renew the lease on her existing flat and to move away instead, to start a new life for herself and Ollie.

Without telling anyone what she was doing—not even Susie and Tom, who had so obviously been taken in by Colin—she had found herself a new flat and new work, and then she had simply disappeared, leaving strict instructions that her forwarding address must remain confidential. It had been easy enough to do in a big city like London.

That had been five months ago now. But she still didn’t feel safe—not one little bit.

She had felt guilty not saying anything to Susie and Tom, but she couldn’t afford to take any risks. They didn’t know Colin as she did, and they didn’t know what he was capable of doing—or how intensely single-minded he could be. She shivered again, remembering how unhappy she had been when their parents had first married, and how she had tried to explain to her mother how apprehensive and ill at ease Colin had made her feel, with his concentrated focus on her, watching everything she did.

He had been away at university then, aged nineteen to her twelve, but after their parents had married—he had decided to change courses, and had ended up living at home and travelling daily to his new university.

Colin had taken a dislike to her best friend Claire, and Annie’s mother had suggested to Annie that it might be better if Claire didn’t come to the house any more after an incident during which Colin had nearly reversed his father’s car into Claire whilst she had been riding her bike.

And now Colin had taken a dislike to Ollie. Annie shivered again.

She had never known her own father. A soldier, from a long line of army men, he had died in an ambush abroad before she had been born. But Annie had been very happy growing up with her mother.

Her father had left them very well provided for—there had been money in his family which had come down to him, and Annie’s mother had always told Annie it would ultimately come down to her. But now it was Colin’s, because her mother had died before her second husband, meaning that the house had passed into his hands and then into Colin’s. The home that should have been hers and Oliver’s was denied to them.

Automatically she looked anxiously towards her son’s cot. Ollie was fast asleep. Unable to resist the temptation, she got up and went to stand looking down at him. He was so beautiful, so perfect, that sometimes just looking at him filled her with so much awe and love that she felt as though her heart would burst with the pressure of it. He was a good baby, healthy and happy, and so gorgeous—with his head of silky dark curls and his startling blue-grey eyes with thick black lashes—that people constantly stopped to admire him. He was bright too, and full of curiosity about the world around him.

They adored him at the council-run nursery where she had to leave him every weekday whilst she went off to her cleaning job—the only other work she had been able to get without too many questions being asked. Most of the others on the team of agency cleaners she worked with were foreign—hard working, but reluctant to talk very much about themselves.

Her present life was a world away from the world in which she had grown up and the future she had expected to have. Ollie’s childhood, unlike hers, would not be spent in a large comfortable house with its own big garden on the edge of a picturesque Dorset village. The area of the city where they lived was run-down, with large blocks of flats—once she would have been horrified at the thought of living here, but now she welcomed its anonymity and its fellow inhabitants, who neither welcomed questions nor asked them.

Ollie opened his eyes and looked up at her, giving her a beaming smile. Annie felt her insides melt. She loved him so much. What an extraordinary thing mother love was—empowering her to love her son despite the horror of his conception.

She flinched again. She tried never to think about what had happened to her in Cannes. Mercifully she had no memory of her ordeal, thanks to the drug that had been slipped into her drink. Susie, who had found her in her room, still drugged and dazed late in the morning after the night of the rape, had wanted her to go to the police but she had refused—too much in shock and too fearful to trust them to believe her. Susie had been wonderfully kind to her. Annie missed her kindness and her friendship.

Like Colin, Susie had felt that her rapist should be forced at least to financially support his child, and it had been Susie who had supplied her stepbrother with Antonio’s name—something Annie herself had refused to do.

Annie hadn’t been surprised when Antonio had refused to do anything, and she had felt relieved when she had read in the papers about Antonio’s death. Now there would never be any need for Ollie to have to learn about his father or how he had been conceived. Unless Colin found them.

Her stomach clenched. He couldn’t. He mustn’t. And she mustn’t think about him doing so just in case somehow her thoughts enabled it to happen.

She thought of herself as a logical, realistic sort of person, well aware of the harsh reality of life, but sometimes at times like this, when she felt so dreadfully alone, she wished that there were such a thing as fairy godmothers who, with one wave of a magical wand, could somehow transport her and Ollie to a place where they could be together and safe, where Colin simply couldn’t reach them.

If she believed in fairy godmothers, guardian angels and wishes then that would be her wish—but of course she didn’t. And wishes couldn’t come true just because one wished them.

The foyer of the five-star hotel was empty of any of its wealthy guests as Annie got down on her hands and knees to remove a piece of trodden-down chewing gum from the marble floor. Her shift was actually over, but the receptionist—who seemed to have taken a dislike to her—had insisted that she pick up the litter dropped, Annie was sure quite deliberately, by the woman who had walked through the lobby a few minutes earlier. Her high heels had clacked on the marble floor, and her look of contempt for Annie had been all too plain as she’d smoothed down the skirt of her no-doubt expensive outfit and then dropped the chewing gum on the floor.

The sun was shining outside, its brilliant rays getting in Annie’s eyes and dazzling her. She blinked, raising her head in an attempt to avoid the too-bright light.

Falcon wasn’t in a very good mood. He had flown into London earlier in the week and had gone straight to a meeting with the head of what was supposed to be the country’s best missing person tracking agency, only to be told that whilst the agency had initially managed to identify Annie Johnson as the mother of Antonio’s child, she had disappeared five months ago, taking her baby with her, and they had not as yet managed to find her.

Falcon had spent a fruitless afternoon with Annie’s stepbrother, to whom he had taken an instant dislike, and now he had received a message from his youngest brother Rocco, telling him that their father’s health had suffered a sudden decline.

‘He’s stable now, and back at the castello.’ Rocco had told him. ‘But the hospital says that he is very frail.’

He needed to be in Sicily, Falcon knew, he had a duty to his family to be there. But he also had a duty to this child conceived so casually by his half-brother, and denied by him as though he was no more than a piece of detritus. Falcon had never liked Antonio. He hadn’t thought it was possible for his contempt for him to increase, but he had been wrong.

As he stepped into the foyer of his hotel, his eyes shielded from the glare of the sun by gold-rimmed discreetly non-logoed Cartier glasses, the first thing he saw was a cleaner, kneeling on the floor beside her bucket of dirty water. She was wearing a body-shrouding, washed-out blue overall and her hair was scraped back from her make-up-free face, but when she lifted her face to avoid the sunlight glaring into her eyes, Falcon’s heart turned over inside his chest and his heart started to race.

It was her. There was no mistake. After all, he’d only just left the office where her photograph had been pinned to the file in front of him. There was no mistaking those intensely blue eyes, nor that elegantly boned and beautifully structured face, with its small straight nose and its softly full mouth—even if right now her skin was drained of life and her expression etched in lines of exhaustion.

The hand she’d reached out to remove the flat grey-white pat of chewing gum that someone had left on the otherwise immaculate floor was red and swollen, her wrist thin and fragile, and her scraped back hair was out of sight beneath some sort of protective cover. But it was her. By some miracle, it was her.

The receptionist was still glowering at her, causing Annie to feel a sudden rush of anger. She had worked over her allotted hours, time for which she would not be paid, and the chewing gum wasn’t her responsibility. She stood up abruptly—and then gasped as her action brought her into immediate physical contact with someone. Not just someone, she recognised as male hands came out to grab her, somehow sliding up under the gaping arms of her overall to fasten round her bare skin. His intention was to fend her off, she imagined, rather than save her from stumbling, since such a man was hardly likely to care about the fate of someone like her. He was wearing an expensive suit, his eyes shielded from her inspection by dark-lensed sunglasses, and his hair were dark and his skin tanned.

He was still holding her—waiting for her to apologise for daring to breathe the same air as him, she thought bitterly. She tugged away from him, only to have his grip on her arms tighten. She looked up at him. A discomforting feeling was running through her body, its source the point of contact between his hands and her skin. Her pulse had started to jump and she was breathing too fast as her heart raced. She felt dizzy, her lungs starved of oxygen as though she had forgotten how to breathe and yet she was breathing—although very unsteadily.

Sensations like the mechanics of a long-unused piece of machinery were coming to painful life inside her. She wanted, she discovered in bemused disbelief, to lean into him, to have his arms come fully around her so that she was held against his maleness. A shudder ripped through her, and her body was hot with guilt and shame.

The most extraordinary feeling had Falcon in its grip. He didn’t know what it was or where it had come from. The only comparison that came readily to his mind was a memory of being young and standing on the edge of one of Sicily’s most dangerous clifftops in the middle of a fierce storm, feeling the wind buffet him, knowing that it could take him and do what it wished with him. He had both wanted to fight its power and give in to it. What he’d felt was a mixture of awe and exhilaration, an awareness of a great power and a desire to test himself against it. It was a sense of being alive, heightened and stretched taut, of being on the edge of something dangerous and compelling.

The receptionist had left her desk and was coming towards them. Somehow Annie managed to wrench herself free and pick up her bucket so that she could make a speedy exit. She could hear the receptionist apologising as she did so.

CHAPTER TWO

SACKED. She had been sacked because a hotel guest had—shock, horror—had to touch her. The hotel receptionist had obviously reported the incident, and a complaint had then been made to the firm that employed her. Her manager had been waiting for her when she had returned with the other workers to the depot, to give her the news. As a part timer she had no comeback. She was now out of a job.

It was supposed to be summer, but the morning’s bright sunshine had now gone and it had started to rain. As she stepped out into the street Annie hunched into her raincoat—a good-quality trenchcoat that belonged to her previous life, a life before the death of her mother and the birth of her son.

She was twenty-four years old, she reminded herself. Far too old to cry because she was alone and vulnerable and desperately worried about how she was going to hold everything together without her cleaning job.

The city streets were busy now, and she didn’t want to be late collecting Ollie from his nursery. There’d been a notice pinned up in the nursery asking for teachers’ assistants at the nearby primary school. Annie would have loved to have applied, but it was too dangerous. They’d check up on her and discover that Antonio’s clever lawyers had threatened to sue her for claiming that he’d raped her, saying that in reality she had consented to having sex with him. Her reputation would be ruined. She had no proof that she had been raped. It had been her word against his and she couldn’t even remember what had happened. She knew beyond any shadow of a doubt, though, that she would not have consented.

Her stepbrother had been furious when he had received that telephone call from Antonio’s solicitors. He had been so sure that Antonio would pay up. She shivered, even though it wasn’t cold, and then pinned a forced smile to her face as she climbed the short flight of stone steps that led to the door of the nursery.

The sunny yellow-painted hall walls were decorated with the children’s brightly coloured artwork, and Mrs Nkobu, one of the more senior staff, greeted her with a warm smile.

‘There’s a man waiting to see you. Mrs Ward wasn’t for letting him—she told him it was against the rules—but it’s plain to see that he’s the kind that doesn’t pay attention to anyone’s own,’ she told Annie she told Annie conspiratorially.

Fear iced down Annie’s spine.

Colin had found them.

Strictly speaking the nursery wasn’t supposed to allow anyone not authorised by a parent to have access to any of the children, but Annie knew how persuasive Colin could be. Nausea curdled her stomach. He would try to take over her life again. He would say it was in her best interests. He would remind her that their parents had left their assets to him because they trusted him to look after her—even though her mother had told her that the house would come to her, because it had belonged to her father.

She mustn’t think about any of that now, she told herself. She would need all her energy and strength to survive the present; she mustn’t waste it on the past.

‘He’s in the carers’ room,’ Mrs Nkobu informed her, referring to the small fusty room with a glass wall through which parents and guardians could watch the children whilst waiting to collect them.

Annie nodded her head, but instead of going to the carers’ room she went to the nursery, busy with other mothers collecting their children. Ollie was sitting on the floor, playing with some toys, and as always when she saw him Annie’s heart flooded with love. The minute he saw her he held out his arms to her to be picked up. Only once she was cradling him tightly in her arms did she feel brave enough to look through the glass panels into the room beyond them.

There was only one person there. He was standing with his back to the glass and he was not Colin. But any relief she might have felt was obliterated by the shock of recognition that arced through her, sending through her exactly the same tingling sensation of deadened sensory nerve-endings awakened into painful life as she had felt earlier in the hotel lobby, when he had held her.

A long-ago memory of herself as a young teenager came back to her. Inside her head she could see herself, giggling with a schoolfriend over a handsome young teenage pop idol they had both had a crush on. She had felt so alive then—so happy, and so unquestioningly secure in her unfolding sexuality. She held Ollie even tighter, causing him to wriggle in her arms at the same moment as the man from the hotel lobby turned round.

He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses now, and she could see his eyes.